Enterprise and data center networks have become increasingly complex. For example, service provider data centers use a variety of switches and routers (collectively referred to herein as a router) to connect thousands of computing systems. Even a relatively small data center can include dozens of switch and routing devices. A data center typically includes multiple racks of computing systems. In turn, each rack may include a switch used to connect the computing systems in that rack to a network. The rack switch itself may be connected to an aggregation switch, which connects multiple racks to the network—sometimes referred to as end-of-row switches. In turn, the end-of-row switches are connected to core switches in a data center, which themselves are connected to external networks. Further, an enterprise data center may also include a storage area (SAN) and a management network, each of which use another set of interfaces on the switching and routing devices.
Plainly, the complex infrastructure for an enterprise computing environment or datacenter requires careful planning and configuration, and a variety of tools are available to help configure and manage an enterprise data center. For example, a data center administrator may specify which interface on a network device to use as a preferred interface for managing that device. Network discovery tools typically rely on the administrator to specify which interface should be used for management, e.g., the loopback address or a lowest/highest available IP address within a given network segment. In other cases, a network discovery tool may resort to a brute force approach to identify a management interface, i.e., each interface is checked for connectivity and manageability.